Most users still don't back up their data. A company's intelligence could reside on hundreds or thousands of C drives, and it could be lost little by little from spilled coffee, fumbled notebooks, and the blue screen of death. Fortunately, vendors are making sure that personal data is protected, even when a user never thinks about it.

Two vendors, Connected Corp. and Iron Mountain Inc., this week unveiled a partnership that could more than double the level of protection available to users. Connected is one of the vendors that uses software to back up data while the user is at work. Iron Mountain provides ultimate protection of files and documents, from online files shooting across the network to vaulted tape libraries in undisclosed secure locations.

Connected gains a stellar level of protection for its customers without causing them to spend any money on infrastructure. Iron Mountain gets even deeper into a company's information to ensure some of the highest levels of protection. Customers could just sign up for Iron Mountain's PC Electronic Vaulting service and they'd gain Connected's nonintrusive level of personal information protection.

Gartner analyst Adam Couture says this level of data protection is a natural step in Iron Mountain's evolution from a company that will still vault paper documents. "This data will be vaulted with Iron Mountain, but Connected backs up the PCs with no negative impact on users," he says. "Most of us don't do a very good job of it ourselves."